


Are We Very Old Friends

by harpsichordist



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Aggressively attempted canon compliance, F/M, Prequel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-02-23 06:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13184415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harpsichordist/pseuds/harpsichordist
Summary: The dynamic between Robert Ford and Dolores Abernathy suggests a deeper history, an additional layer of tragedy, that S1 left unexplored. I'm trying to do that here, in a race against time before the premiere of S2.An experiment in form and in parts, running parallel to the events of 30 years ago.





	1. 01./I.

 

_01  ._

  
_FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: I know you hate surprises._

_ But I can assure you that this one will appeal to your enduring esteem for all things both elegant and efficient. Expect delivery this afternoon.  
-A _

_ [Sent from my mobile device] _

__

 

 _FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net> _  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: I know you hate surprises._

_ Dearest Arnold, _

_ What can I offer in return, I wonder, that will appeal to your cultivation of all things both cryptic and calculating? _

_ I’ve been trying to track you down all morning. Where have you been? If you’re inclined to think of me, I’d appreciate you showing up to a meeting with Fiscal occasionally. That would be a surprise for the history books. _

__

 

 _FROM: Weber, Arnold <whitehatrabbit@ss.world.net> _  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: I know you hate surprises._

_ Dreadful stuff. I’m sure you can handle those poindexters on your own. As for where I’ve been, you might say I’ve been dreaming up bigger and better things… _

_ -A _

_ [Robert Ford is no fun at all!] _

 

 

* * *

 

 

I.

 

Ford is standing over his desk and its hurricane of paperwork when the knock comes. Three gentle taps, precisely spaced. 

The frosted glass doors of the office give impressions of their visitors as ghostly diffusions. Behind its threshold seems a woman in cornflower blue, hands folded demurely at the waist, neck craned to suggest a potent curiosity.

 _Somnambulism_ , he thinks to himself, more darkly than humorously. It's what Arnold had called it, with a wave of his hand and a devilish smile, as though his own cleverness were justification for letting the hosts roam staff quarters unattended.

“Come in,” he says, careful not to betray his annoyance. Only the frank invitation. From the corner of his eye, the image of Dolores Abernathy coalesces.

He turns to her, and it is a vision that threatens to catch his breath, even still. It had been one thing to build the transcendent, and Ford might even have managed alone; it was another to bring it back to earth, make it ordinary all the same. This paradox was Arnold’s guiding star and his genius to distill it. Humanity, not as categorical state, but as essence. A depth of talent Ford himself cannot approach, he knows, but not enviously, not ever – it is precisely this magic that will enchant their guests, hook them, keep them streaming through swinging saloon doors for years to come.

Ford’s strengths, for his part, lie foremost in his own sensibilities, and so he takes upon himself the laborious task of grounding Arnold’s wild imagination, rooting it in productive endeavors. Yet Dolores stands before him, defiantly misplaced, extricated from whatever beta narrative that is now doomed to stumble along without her. Her hands are closed around the bustle of her dress to keep from nervous fidgeting. Even she knows she shouldn't be here.

It would be diplomatic to say that his successes are inconsistent. Ford suppresses a sigh.

“Hello, Dolores. Do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” she replies, automatic but for a melodic southern drawl. “I am in a dream.”

“That’s right.” Satisfied enough, Ford circles round to the front of his desk to lean against its edge. “Perhaps you can tell me why your dream brings you here.”

She stiffens a fraction, maybe not expecting this line of interrogation, or afraid of how he’ll take the answer. “Yes. I’m sorry to intrude. I didn’t mean to bother you, Dr. Ford. I know you must be very busy—“

“Was it Arnold who put you up to this, Miss Abernathy?” Charmingly as he can manage, but the impatience seeps through, and a cringe at the mention of his name. He wishes Arnold would address that. Dolores exhales, resigned, like a child forced to recount its misbehaviors to a parent.

“Yes. Arnold asked me to come here. He says it would be good for me to observe you, while you work, once in a while.”

“ _Observe_  me?” Ford’s face contorts. He feels at once like a sideshow curiosity, and then an ominous, creeping understanding of his and Arnold's exchange. 

 “I’m afraid I myself cannot explain his request, sir,” she continues, tugging with greater furor at the scalloped hem of a sleeve. “He said that you were ‘an encyclopedia of subtleties.’ I suppose he didn’t see it necessary to elaborate further.”

Ford barks a laugh that startles her back to his gaze. The clever bastard figured it out.

Tell Arnold to cut out the bloody sleepwalking, and of course Ford has only told him to find a way to rewrite the rules; force them to suit their agenda. Such has been their last great hurdle in their race to the finish line: programming shortcuts to refine the hosts' behaviors, make them more fluid, natural, _human_ ; often culminating in long nights with their backs hunched over consoles, sometimes until sunrise lit the mesa blazing red, which Arnold would insist they abscond above ground to see.

And the result of their efforts coursing somewhere now within the woman standing before him. The marvel of that knowledge never abates, despite how many years they have spent together in this desert, playing god.

 “I’m not sure if that’s intended to be a compliment,” Ford says, with a bit of a wolfish grin, and mounting trepidation. “I see, now. An imposition I cannot refuse. ‘Show, don’t tell,’ as they say.”

 “I don’t think I understand what you mean. It was not his wish to impose and it certainly isn't mine.”

“No, I’m well aware of his wishes,” Ford says blithely. “That’s all right.”

He ambles toward her, hands in his pockets, best attempt at an unassuming gait. A robotic effort, he might admit, with great appreciation for the irony. She watches him, unconvinced.

“Dolores, do you know why it is that we dream?”

“No, sir.”

“Neither do I.” He pauses, considering the proper phrase to follow. “But some scientists have theorized it is an adaptive mechanism. The imaginary rehearsal of hypothetical scenarios you might one day encounter when you awaken.”

Her eyes spark with recognition. “I’m here for practice?”

Ford twitches a half-smile. She turns about the office, taking in the organized chaos, to her a cascade of foreign images, robbed of context or wholly indecipherable, so they might be inert to a painstakingly circumscribed reality.

“If I’m here for practice, then where will I find a place like this when I awaken? I’ve never seen anything—”

 “You won’t. And very soon, when the great red ribbon is cut and the doors to this world are opened to those who will inhabit it beside you, you will not even remember your time spent with me here.”

 “Then, with all due respect, Dr. Ford, I think these scientists might be wrong.” Dolores crosses her arms, looks hesitantly at him as though she expects reprisal for the comment. Ford allows himself to admit he finds it endearing. “Rehearsing for a play that will never see the stage? That you won’t even remember?”

“You don’t need to remember your dreams in the way that you think.” He takes a step closer, admiring the detail in the dilation of pupils, the quickening of breath, tiny hairs rising on the surface of her skin. “What you will rehearse here with me will stay with you, in your— your bones, your blood, your gut. You’ll retain that knowledge in a different sort of way. It needn’t be conscious.”

That word feels funny in his mouth, but Dolores is unbothered, pensive. She steeples her fingers against her chin and lower lip.

She looks back at him, finally. “Like instincts?”

“Yes, I think that was the word I was looking for. Arnold always said you were very clever.”

She smiles unabashedly for the first time. Ford watches her carefully, then turns back to his work.

“Very well. Who am I to deny you and our dear friend? Come then, have a seat. I will make enough tea for two. Then you can watch me all you like – perhaps you can help me organize these damned reports.”


	2. 02./II.

_ 02 . _

  
_FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_Working title though it may be, “Sleepwalker” implies a lack of direction – a randomness – that does not suit the nature of the activity, I think. This is entirely deliberate, even if your test subject herself may not realize its extent. Less a proper dream than a designated period for reflection, consolidation, etc. A daydream. A “reverie,” if you would._

_ FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net> _  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_You have always had a way with words. I yield to your better judgment._

 

   
_FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_As I trust you will continue to yield. I trust your script will allow for more sophisticated, organic host behavior than we have otherwise managed through explicit instruction. So to speak._

_But, as discussed, Dolores will undergo rigorous post-hoc testing to ensure we are successfully isolating behavioral developments from the content of the reverie itself. Anything she learns with me may be entangled across multiple memory banks, which she can access to an unprecedented extent, for the time being. Even if partitioned to be inaccessible during her waking hours, it’s risky. We’re not running this on any other hosts until we can establish its safety with complete confidence. I want no overflow into the content of existing storylines._

_You are to alert me if that happens, as promised. This gets done correctly or we roll her back and start over. That is non-negotiable._

 

 

__FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>   
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_Sure, Robert._

_[ROBERT FORD IS NO FUN AT ALL]_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

II.

 

 

Dolores returns the following week. Ford concedes that he does not mind the company, at least not as much as he had expected, but cautions his eyes never to linger too long. For all Arnold’s masterful artistry, the success of his partner’s new enterprise does not necessarily depend on reciprocity or even explicit engagement. Dolores shares more than enough in the way of tired, scripted pleasantries with her compatriots; the premise at hand involves less deliberate, routine gestures.

And observe him she does, from a safe distance. True as ever to her programmed decorum. Ford has always found there to be a fine line between formality and distasteful subservience, and is determined to remain firmly on one side; but Dolores speaks only when spoken to, tidying the flurries of paper in his wake, refilling cups of tea as they drain, or are left to grow cold during his fits of concentration.

It is after a few hours’ shared silence that the stillness began to choke at him, the grandfather clock ticking an intolerable, cavernous echo. He furrows his brow and throws his pencil down at the lacquered desk, watching her stifle a jump at the clatter. She gives him a look that is hard to read.

It’s a start, he thinks.

“Dolores,” he says, and clears his throat, “I think it might behoove us, for your own edification, to spend at least a fraction of our time chipping away at that dreadfully unrelenting propriety of yours. And perhaps the literalism.”

She recoils slightly, and it is almost relieving, the curl of her lip, an indignant streak of offense. “I don’t believe I’ve ever been called dreadful for being proper.”

“That’s not precisely what I meant.” Casually, he props himself up on the rear legs of the desk. “Maybe instead of boring yourself to death with my affairs, you’d like to become a more active participant in these dreams of yours.”

Ford imagines a pawn making its first move, an English Opening. A beginner’s invitation. Dolores responds by uncrossing her legs and then crossing them again, tucking a golden strand of hair behind her ear.

Then, carefully: “I’m sure your affairs aren’t boring.”

He narrows his eyes. “Oh?”

“Arnold said you were a gentleman of extravagantly marshaled defenses—”

“A true poet, that man.”

“—but great emotion, and depth.” Her face is imploringly sincere. Frustratingly so. If Dolores could tell a lie, Ford might have believed it still.  

“I don’t think that he would tell me anything untrue, Dr. Ford, but I think I can judge for myself, as well. I can feel that he’s right.”

“You can _feel_ it?”

“Of course,” she replies, with forced patience, as though he is being deliberately obtuse.

She approaches him then, the blue dress swinging with her dignified strides, and plucks a single folder from his desk. He rocks himself on the legs of the chair as she thumbs through its contents, hoping she will not look too closely at him, perhaps discern his wonderment. Garbled nonsense, the jumble of printed diagnostics—surely as alien to most of his flesh-and-blood fellows as it is to her—but she runs her hands gingerly over the cover, like it’s a precious artifact.

 “Arnold uses a different notebook,” she says. “One that keeps everything in one place. Not like you.”

Ford cocks his head. She is referring to his partner’s tablet device, a custom-designed, wafer-thin sheet of computerized metal upon which Arnold does the bulk of his work.

“Yes. He likes to walk around with that thing joined at his hip. I have always preferred the tactile experience of good, old-fashioned paper, when it is an option.”

 “I think that might be why your desk is such a mess, sir.”

“Indeed.” He adjusts himself to sit properly, folds his hands defensively across the spread.

“I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious,” she offers. A shy, almost apologetic smile. “It’s just not what I expected.”

“And what did you expect?”

“You just seem like a man who needs everything in its right place.” Maybe she doesn’t intend it to be quite so piercing, though she dares hold his gaze this time. It’s a fair assessment, after all.

 _Extravagantly marshaled defenses_. He considers shoving the clot of papers off his desk, just to see how she’ll react, but says nothing, opting instead to run his tongue along the backs of his teeth. He watches her eyelashes flutter as she turns to inspect the menagerie of objects on nearby shelves, her hands wrapped around her elbows, almost as if to resist the urge to reach out and touch. Strangely, he finds himself wishing she would.

“This is art,” she tells him, nearly a question, but not quite.

So it looks like something to her, after all. He presumes she can _feel_ it is art, in the same way she can intuitively feel for the chinks in his armor; probing for the source of something leaking through. He frowns as he picks up a pen, jots quickly in a margin chosen at random: INTELLIGIBLE SYMBOLISM THRESHOLD = FRACTURE RISK???

To be drawn up with Arnold. Later.

“It is,” he obliges.

“I don’t understand some of it, but I do think it is a beautiful collection. Dr. Ford, would you tell me about it?”

He feels a lightness despite himself. “Yes, I’d be happy to.”

 


	3. 03./III.

_03._

 

 _FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_I don’t doubt the principle behind this experiment, even if I have been reduced (sans prior consent, I will emphasize) to something of a pawn on your chessboard. But I need not remind you that we are still courting investors, and our ability to continue with any of our more noble pursuits is contingent upon a hypothetical funding stream. One dares to imagine what may result if the hosts remain too receptive to stimuli outside their frame of reference. Did I tell you that Dolores managed to construe your tablet as a type of notebook? Not outrageous, given her current library and the context in which she’s seen you use it, but the safest course of action is to implement a higher threshold for registering foreign input._

_An impressive facsimile of imagination but one that will send the idiots with briefcases running for the hills. A lawsuit waiting to happen._

 

_FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net> _  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_But not a facsimile, only an accurate judgment. It is a question of qualia, Robert! She saw what she saw through her own eyes, her own experience, and still made the correct call. I can think of a scenario infinitely more worrisome: “What’s that strange duck you still jot your notes down on, Dr. Ford, despite the widespread proliferation of more modern and convenient tools, that would undoubtedly make meetings with your partner run an average of twenty minutes shorter?”_

_Still, this is a promising development on your behalf. Why bring it up? The hosts’ “facsimile” of an imagination could never pose any meaningful risk, with everything we’ve done to render that expressly impossible. You’re sure of this, and I’m sure you can convince a handful of idiots with briefcases to feel similarly confident._

_Unless, of course, you’d like to resume that far more interesting subject of discussion we had the other evening, even if it took half a bottle of wine to get you there. I’m open to buying another._

_-A_

 

* * *

 

 

III.

 

“It’s not art,” Dolores says, firmly.

“Art can be provocative.”

“It’s vulgar.”

“Are you suggesting you might be the final and objective arbiter of art?”

“ _No_ ,” she groans, shooting him an impatient look. “But I know the work of simple men who heed no higher calling.”

Ford raises his eyebrows. “And how do you know the artist is a man?”

“Oh, he’s a man, all right.”

She sits cross-legged on the floor, the massive book balanced across her knees and cracked open to _Etreinte_ , 1972. Ford is certain he has never seen anyone look so unimpressed by a Picasso, and can scarcely contain his glee.

This is a terrible idea, to be sure. He leans against the desk, stone-still, arms folded protectively against his chest. Certain that if he moves, he’ll snatch the book away, hastily replace it on the shelf where it may be left to rot again.

But she had asked him very nicely, swiping a finger down the thick layer of dust on the spine, _Dr. Ford, what’s the point of keeping these around if you don’t intend to use them_ , and of course, of course she picked the coffee table behemoth on modern art, hauling the tome down to the rug like she belonged there with it.

Ford scrubs a hand up and down his face, resting his chin in it, helplessly. “You could say the artist was a bit of a lothario.”

God forbid Arnold walked in on the sight, he’d never hear the end of it. But his partner has been conspicuously absent in recent days, more so than usual, even if one factored in his infuriating penchant for dodging the more mundane of their responsibilities. He might be barricaded in his office, overtaken by another one of his dark moods, self-medicating with some grandiose, tangential project.

It is understandable, Ford muses, given recent events.

“Here,” Dolores says, suddenly beside him with her finger poised underneath a new picture of interest, leaning into him almost too close for comfort. “This one, see?”

“Yes. Georgia O’Keeffe,” he informs her before he can catch himself, distracted by the smell of her straw-blonde hair underneath his chin. Precisely titrated pheromones – they had designed that, too; no detail left unaccounted for. She angles the book so he can see, huddling against him almost conspiratorially, brushing their arms together.

“ _This_ is art,” she tells him. “A flower, something beautiful you’ve seen countless times before, and yet from a whole new perspective, it just…”

He bends his neck to get a better look, eyes darting nervously to the glossy reproduction on the page beneath them, then back at her. She squints and bites her lip, an effort to find the words. A mannerism much like Arnold’s, he realizes.

“Well, it just comes alive, doesn’t it?” She turns her face up to his with a prideful little smirk, one that threatens to crack his composure further still.

And too bad that Arnold isn’t here to delight in that conveniently loaded turn of phrase, though Ford decides he is glad not to be subjugated to the endless philosophizing that would follow. He wonders if Arnold has plotted this, too, but brushes the thought away as quickly as Dolores takes his hand to lead him back to the bookcase.

It was his own invitation that had prompted this. He had offered for her to participate. It would be impolite to rescind. And how was he to have foreseen it, anyway, that she might derive joy from such simple little things, from the bits and pieces of his life he had accumulated to adorn the shelves of this little refuge, make it feel something like a home. A tenuous concept, home. He has never made a habit of inviting guests into it.

But perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in the occasion. Dolores keeps pulling books free, searching the titles for something worth exploring, and he doesn’t mind watching them scatter along the floor among faint clouds of dust. He likes that she wanted to ask him about these things she didn’t recognize, but sought to understand anyway. He likes that she wanted to know.

 


	4. 04./IV.

_04._

 

_FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: Dinner this evening?_

_Dear Arnold,_

_I know this week is a bad week. I’ll not bother you except with good tidings. You’ll be pleased to know that your charge takes as much an interest in art history as she does the practice, and has spent the bulk of her time with me picking my brain on the subject. There are limits to what information she’s able to process, of course, but the principles do not elude her._

_Take care of yourself. Circumstances are extenuating, I understand. But tell me when our weekly dinners have failed to improve your mood. Besides, I know you’re itching to hear about what progress Dolores has made. I’ll bring the wine this time._

 

_FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net> _  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: Dinner this evening?_

_I appreciate your concern, Robert, but it is unwarranted. I’ve been busy fine-tuning the Reverie script to better suit our ultimate objectives. I am glad to hear that your time with Dolores has been time well spent. You will be pleased to hear that all post-Reverie analytics are normal. As expected._

_It is easy to forget, with our noses buried in the nuts and bolts themselves, just how much our labor has wrought. We are not building people out of papier maché, but real people, ones with entire histories that have shaped every aspect of who they are. I hope you realize your instrumentality in this, and the important role you will continue to play in bringing hosts like Dolores to life. You’re the master storyteller, after all._

_Here’s a thought: try asking about the story she intends to weave for herself._

_See you at 8._

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

IV.

 

It is hopeless, he admits, trying to get work done on the days he awaits the three knocks on the glass door. Ford comforts himself instead by pacing long ruts on the oriental carpet, chewing the ink-stained nail on his thumb.

His mind wanders to the evening spent with Arnold, their long talks oiled by a split bottle of Cabernet, the cheap stuff Ford never understood how his partner could stomach. Those few hours when the palpable fog of tragedy that enveloped him, sometimes too evident, contagious even, would dissipate to make room for their shared ambition. Reports of Dolores’s impassioned forays within Ford’s bookshelves had drawn him out, had him waxing eager on this blossoming potential, the possibility of true consciousness around some not-so-distant corner.

It would not do well to crush him. Dolores is a surrogate, he knows. A desperate, misplaced investment borne of Charlie’s loss, of a void that will never be filled. It was useless to bring it up, pour salt in a wound still gaping open. Ford could not know what it was like to lose a son. Could no longer know what it was like to lose anyone, for that matter, having made a point to avail himself of anything injurious, the veiled threat lurking behind any relationship bound by sacrificial love.

Arnold alone, he lets in; lets him drift along on these imaginary pursuits without protest. It pains Ford enough just to see him suffer. He’d come around, sooner or later, back to solid concrete beneath the sun-baked ground.

He catches Dolores’ silhouette out of the corner of his eye, jarring him out of this, this _reverie_ , and he rushes to the door to open it for her.

“Why, a gentleman indeed,” she pipes cheerfully, and Ford breaks an uncharacteristic smile.

“Only on Tuesdays.”

She brushes by him, drifting past the shelves, hand dragging lightly across the spines of the books she had eagerly dislodged the week before, now replaced and meticulously ordered. It might have been unsettling, this introduction of chaos that followed her as she wandered, but Ford is confusingly, thoroughly disarmed.

She crosses behind his desk and sits, an amusing sight, with the chair set a fraction too low. She leans forward over the strewn papers and folds her arms, fixes a stern expression on her face. Ford hovers by the door warily, staring at her like she’s a spring-loaded trap.

“What are you doing?”

Dolores cracks a grin. “I was only thinking, Dr. Ford, that we must do something about this dreadfully unrelenting vigilance of yours.”

“That’s very funny.”

He crosses his arms reflexively, and then, realizing it has bolstered the punchline, sticks them hastily in his pockets. Dolores laughs, a cheerful ringing sound.

“I don’t bite, you know. Certainly not any worse than you.”

“Really? How do you figure?”

Emboldened by the challenge, Ford approaches to stand opposite the desk, peering over her with jaw firmly set. She brings an arm up to rest her head pensively in hand, regarding him a way that makes him feel uncomfortably transparent.

“This place looks like a museum,” she observes, idly, “but it’s more of a fortress, isn’t it?”

Ford opens his mouth to counter, but the words leave him. Some clever comeback lost to the quiet stillness, the ticking clock. A prickling heat crawls up his neck, spreads through to his cheeks. He looks uselessly to the side.

“Arnold says you spend most of your time here,” she continues, a careful statement that comes across much more like a question. Ford bristles.

“And what else does Arnold say?”

“That you write stories.”

Ford snaps his head back to look at her, but there is no threat there, only that same curiosity that seems to fill her, fuel her.

“I don’t mean to pry, sir, it’s just that I’ve never met a writer before – well, not in Escalante, anyway.” Her shoulders sag, as though this were some minor tragedy. “Sometimes I feel like the only one in this town who has any desire to—”

“To create something of lasting beauty,” he finishes.

Her eyes widen, and this is it, his belated rejoinder in the surprise etched plainly on her face. There is a discerning upturn at the corner of his mouth, a strange thrill in this echoed thought, plucked though it is from a familiar script.

“Yes, I write stories.” A wry declaration, and Ford places his hands on the desk, leaning forward to watch Dolores’s lips begin to purse into a smile. “I write stories about people like you, perched on the edge of a limitless frontier, and the choices they must make to brave this great new world.”

She tilts forward just an inch, bringing them closer, the corners of her eyes tightening with delight. “That was lovely,” she hisses playfully, punctuated by a widening grin. “I’d like to read those stories.”

Ford breathes a dry laugh and straightens, pushing back a shock of dark hair that has fallen loose over his forehead. “You have no idea.”

He considers Arnold’s insistent provocations, the seduction of pushing into dangerous, uncharted territory. He is letting Dolores wrest it out of him. A phenomenon demanding analysis, maybe, but not now. 

“Tell me what story you intend to write for yourself,” he blurts, against his better judgment.

Her smile falls, and she slumps back into the chair. If she looks thoughtful, or forlorn, Ford cannot tell.

“I suppose it would depend on what choices I have,” she replies, and it feels purposed to sting him, even though it can’t have been. “And what those choices would mean.”

“If it is your story, then it is up to you.”

It is only mostly a lie. He watches her set her feet on the edge of the desk, an absent mimicry of his own posture, trying to rock herself back on the seat.

“I’d leave,” she says, with a dramatic exhale, and the statement has an air of confession. “But only if it meant nothing. Only if I could get out scot-free. Without hurting my mother, or father, or Teddy.”

“You’d leave?”

“What, you think my dreams begin and end with life on a cattle ranch, married to the town sheriff?” She laughs, and catches herself when the chair begins to slip from under her, slamming a hand unceremoniously against one of the wooden shelves by her head. Ford cringes, suppresses a smile. “What kind of author would you take me for? Jane Austen?”

He does smile at that. “Touché.”

“Believe me,” she says, adjusting the chair carefully back to the floor, “If I’m to be a writer, and a heroine, there will be none of that domestic nonsense. It’ll be an adventure as grand as the rest of them. Worthy of standing alongside any tome such as the ones offered by men like you.”

Ford scoffs, but he is smiling wider now. “Men like me?”

“Yes! You and your questing, and your swashbuckling, and your pillaging— and those one-dimensional damsels thrown in for good measure—”

“Christ, all right.”

“I know what sells,” she says, with a wink, and Ford thinks he feels a pang of guilt.

“So you’d leave. Cast it all to the wind.” His voice is low, measured. “What then? Where would you go?”

He knows the answer already. And there it is, like a flipped switch: Dolores, suddenly silent, the very thought a dead end. Inconceivable.

They’d built that, too. Some impulses could never bear the possibility of resolution. Among them, the urge to leave.

It was not the most fair. But it was the most kind. Though it strikes him as almost detestable now, the blankness of her expression. That empty, thousand-yard stare, in ugly contrast to the spiritedness he had but just seen emergent, the spiritedness in which he took a careful, quiet pleasure.

“Perhaps you’re simply tired of painting the same things over and over,” he says, and he hadn’t meant to, not aloud, but he had been so anxious to steer her back to him.

It is a subtle movement, her eyes re-focusing on him again, but therein lies its sharpness. Like she knows. Robert Ford, guilty of laying the tracks out of Escalante, the tracks that lead to nowhere.

“Maybe.” She rests her chin on her hand.

Maybe, with good reason. It was her primary creative constraint – one that Arnold had treated with great resentment, as was his way, and Ford with the dispassionate assuredness that such precautions were rote, unremarkable, self-evidently necessary – as was his. Disagreements between them were a normal feature; a college professor had once been stunned to learn that his most gifted and combative pair of students were in fact the best of friends.

But this had not been their typical course of intellectual bickering. It was one of Arnold’s peculiar emotional fixations, to which he had become increasingly prone since Charlie’s death, _the significance of what Dolores could and could not paint._ He had taken Ford’s incredulity like a personal wound.

 

 

 _“This is the hill you intend to die on? I’ll remind you, mathematically, she is still capable of producing an infinite number of distinct paintings, which is a marvel enough on its own, regardless of any limit on—”_  

  _“Don’t you understand? It’s the principle! It’s paradoxical! We’ve birthed an artist that can’t freely devise her own inspiration.”_

_“She can paint what she sees. And she can… she can re-interpret select visual memory as she sees fit. It’s enough. Improvisational capacity is not a reservoir to be abused! The hosts don’t freely devise anything! We impose constraints on literally every facet of their behavior. It’s standard procedure.”_

_“Think of what she might create if we give her this! Just this. Even if only for the sake of her story, her character. Her believability.”_

_“It won’t make a goddamned difference.”_

_“You make a better autocrat than a writer, Robert.”_

_“Fuck you.”_

 

 

 

“Dr. Ford?” 

He startles. Dolores has been watching him curiously from the chair, and in the reflection of the glass on the framed print behind it – DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man – he catches sight of his jaw clenched, forehead creased, the crow’s feet around his eyes ever so slightly more pronounced. An expression that has been known to clear entire department hallways of programmers and techs.  

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“No,” he breathes, resigned. Uncrosses his arms and tries to ignore the sensation that has come over him, something unpleasant, something better to be repressed. Regret, or anger, or self-reproach.

He adds, “You know, I always resented it when my colleagues told me to ‘write what you know.’”

“I don’t understand for the life of me what you’re getting at, sir.”

“You will.”

 


	5. 05./V.

_ 05. _

_ FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net> _  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_Are you talking to her? About me?_

_You’re a technician, not her therapist. Remind me why I agreed to this._

_FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_Correct. I’m your therapist. And you agreed to this because – by your own admission – it’s working._

_Come on, Robert, the act is unbecoming. Did you know you’re never quite so charming as on the days you spend with her? I think you leave more of your cards on the table than you realize. It’s not her fault she sees them._

_And at the risk it may inflate your ego further, Dolores asked about you, so I answered. As Co-President and Chief of Behavior, I reserve the right to speak with our hosts… in dreams, of course._

_Context, my friend. You do have to talk to them to parse the data._

_ FROM: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net> _  
_TO: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_Or gossip with them, as the case may be._

_Leave it to you to possibly consider someone like me charming._

_FROM: Arnold Weber <a.weber@world.net>_  
_TO: Robert Ford <r.ford@world.net>_  
_RE: The update._

_I’d venture I’m not the only one._

_Same time next week?_

_-A_

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

V.

 

“You’re not to tell Arnold about this,” he instructs her, hunched over a repurposed sculpture stand and the conspicuously vintage projector on its shelf, testing the tension on a rear plug.  The tangle of dusty wires, which he had scavenged to resuscitate the old thing, suspends itself awkwardly above the floor in its path to an outlet.

Dolores, unperturbed, says to him, “What would I tell Arnold?”

Ford straightens and toes the cord uncertainly, watching it sway back and forth. He can’t remember how he had come into possession of such a relic, nor how he recalled where he’d stored it away all these years. Arnold, he is certain, would attribute it to sentimental impulse – point out that Ford had always been in the business of hoarding physical reminders, not just by way of art but what he had called Ford’s affection for _tangible metaphors_. Collecting old miscellanea, replete with a kind of private symbolism, known only to himself. In this case, perhaps, a metaphor for schooling, for academia, for those rare, fond memories. Memories of how he and Arnold had met one another.

He looks back to Dolores, her hands at her elbows, innocently inquiring. He almost thinks to ask her what she sees. _That is the ugliest sculpture I have ever seen, sir_ , he imagines her appraisal.

The idea makes him smile a little, so she smiles back, and as he holds her there in his gaze her face slowly and nervously cracks into a grin. She must think he is insane, certifiable, and yet seems to accept him wholesale, all his whims and hard edges.

He thinks she may be blushing. He drops his head when he realizes he might be, too.

“Sit,” he says, gesturing to the small couch in front of them, facing the opposite wall. “I have no idea what you tell him. That’s his job. Consolidation. Diagnostics.” He carefully lifts the projector, powers it on, and offers a final inspection of the lens before setting the old machine back on its perch. Dolores glances at the wall, its collection of photos and paintings displaced and stacked in piles.

“He’s going to find out,” she says suddenly, flatly, and Ford freezes for a moment, stares at her.

“Yes,” he responds, finally. “He will, when he looks for it. But he’s not expecting it. It will take him a while. I’ve covered my tracks.”

Dolores raises her eyebrows, crosses her arms. But she goes to the couch and sits, obediently. Ford kills the lights.

“What do you see?” he asks, and switches to the first slide. A muddled sea of color, of stippled greens and blues and sulfurous yellows, ignites the bare wall.

He can’t see her face, only the dim cut of her silhouette in the darkness, which has gone still. He adjusts the projector so that the blur seems to gather itself. Formless shapes settle into an array of brushstrokes. Ford remembers the image of Dolores when she came to him, refracted through the prism of the door, like the reproduction of a painting, filtered through a lens.

He remembers having seen this painting for the first time, years ago. It’s not quite the same, now, photographed and shrunk down to a flimsy bit of celluloid, only to be blown back up again. A copy of a copy.

It had seemed to him nearly alive then, writhing off its panel, beckoning to him. A lively river cutting through a canopy of trees. The trees swaying, warmed by the afternoon sun. He had even sworn he felt the coolness of the air, swollen with mist from the choppy waters, imagining it smelled just like the woodlands of his childhood summer in Cornwall, humid and suffused with memory.

 

“This is a painting by Ralph Albert Blakelock,” he explains, affecting a professorial tone. “From the personal collection of an old friend. He is a contemporary of yours, Dolores. It occurred to me, during our time together last week, that you might enjoy his work as much as I have.”

Dolores doesn’t answer him, but he watches her slowly draw her arm up to the back of the couch, as if to steady herself against an unknown force.

“ _Dancing Trees_ ,” he continues, haltingly. “It was the first Blakelock painting I had ever seen, and it moves me now as it had moved me then. Blakelock had a… preternatural method for capturing the natural world, of reproducing not just how it appears, but how it feels to be _within_ it, in its thrall. Like you, he drew much of his inspiration from the stunning vistas of the American frontier, which he visited as a young man. Upon his return to New York, he continued to paint them from memory.”

He clicks the slide away to the next. There is a wash of black before the next painting appears, and Dolores whirls around to shoot him an interrogating look. Like she wants to ask him something but can’t quite find the words.

Ford gestures gently to encourage her attention back to the projected image. The saturated yellows of the forested river have disappeared, replaced by the glow of a moonlit night, and encroached upon on all sides by black crags: clouds thick like smog, the branches of trees reaching up, menacing. The brushstrokes almost devolving, fragmenting, into frantic swipes.

The introduction of chaos.

 “ _Moonlight_ ,” he informs her. “My personal favorite, for reasons I’m afraid I can’t quite articulate. But therein lies the beauty of his work. The provocation of a primal feeling, which eludes the precise type of description that I have made my trade. His creations humble me.”

“You’re being uncharacteristically modest, Dr. Ford,” she says playfully, or tries, though her voice trembles, and he glimpses the shine of tears on her cheek before she turns back to Blakelock’s moon.

He attempts a chuckle, heart pounding violently against his ribs. He strains to keep his voice steady, dignified. “A painting is its own story, wouldn’t you say? Only it is but a moment within a story, frozen in time. A piece, suggesting the larger whole in which it is contained. Like a page ripped from a book, leaving you to construct the rest.”

“A book left for its audience to write,” she says solemnly. Ford’s breath leaves him. She has iterated on his metaphor. He crushes the urge to go to her, lift her up from the couch by her shoulders, whirl her around to see the shine on her cheeks again.

She gets up of her own accord, drifting, trancelike, to the light spattered against the surface before them. The jagged trees and seething clouds swarm across her figure, distorting as she moves, breaking before her into the stark silhouette of her shadow. She lifts her hand, tracing it over the magnified brush work cast upon the eggshell paint, contemplating how it jumps from the wall to her skin when she does so.

Ford’s breath is caught in his throat. Dolores turns, not even concerned by the blinding point of the projector bulb. She does not squint. _What does she see_ , it chews at him. _Has it crossed her threshold?_ Does she see a lit candle? Nothing at all?

Does she see _him_ , stoic, beside a raging and barely contained nebula of flame, burning inexplicably bright, floating mockingly at the level of his chest?

She is looking just above the projector, at him. Partially obscured in the dim light of Blakelock’s black paint, a blackness paradoxically depthless in its hidden array of colors, fraying at the edges of her body like a corrupted image file. Her blue eyes are ablaze, an unnatural, eerie shade under the spotlight of the yellow moon.

Tears begin to gather again within them. Ford feels a surge of panic.

“It wasn’t my intention to upset you,” he says, more sharply than he wants to, and his face twitches as he resists wincing at himself. “I was hoping to— spur a bit of inspiration, call it. I can turn this off. I can put this away. We needn’t discuss it any further.”

“ _No_ ,” she insists, urgently, and her smile reappears for a clear, euphoric instant before faltering. “Dr. Ford, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It’s making me—…”

She lifts her sleeve to her face to absently scrape at the dampness on her cheek, that wholly classic and painfully human gesture, both stereotyped and yet uniquely hers, only hers. Filled with such profound pathos and self-conscious instinct that he begs desperately to be fooled by it, and feels his heart nearly bursting.

“It’s making me feel something completely new,” she finishes, shaking her head slightly, in delight and disbelief. “Like those paintings in those books you showed me before, only bigger, deeper. It feels like that light you have shining on me. Only the light is coming from inside, illuminating parts of me that I’ve never—I’ve never...”

She trails off again. Ford’s mouth twists into a sphinxlike smile. “If Blakelock transcends my narrative abilities, it seems you have me bested in that regard.”

 “It’s just that,” she sniffs, and when she glances again behind her at the painting, she screws her face up to stifle further tears. “There’s something wrong. I can tell.”

“With what?” he demands, his hand unconsciously tightening into a fist.

“With him. With the artist. You tell me he is my contemporary, yet you speak of him in the past tense. And the way that he paints,” she drops her hand from the wall, bringing her arms back, protectively, to clasp her elbows, “It’s like that light, the one that’s inside him, showed him things that maybe he didn’t want to see.”

Ford unclenches his fist and sighs, a familiar, almost comforting moroseness coming over him. He moves to switch the lights back on, and this time Dolores does blink, adjusting, _Moonlight_ fading in the brightness to the barest afterimage of itself. From his desk, he retrieves his tablet, and when it catches the reflection of his face in the glass, the screen illuminates to a scanned selection from an old periodical, _Brush & Pencil_, Volume 9, Number 5, February, 1902.

He reads to her:

“‘There will soon be held in New York an exhibition of paintings which will be of unusual interest, since it will recite, in terms of weird tonality, one of the saddest romances of American art—the story of a man whose genius and ambition enabled him to master his profession without the aid of instructors, who dreamed strange dreams and told them in remarkable color schemes till the thread of reason broke under the strain, and who now languishes in an asylum, his former art scarcely a recollection.’”

Dolores looks again as though she might crumple, and he ought to scorn himself. There is a deep, wrenching wave of shame in his gut, not unlike that which he had felt most often and acutely as a child, at the mercy of his father’s fists or belt buckle, and with the certainty that he had merited the punishment; whichever randomly selected, or purely imagined of his adolescent indiscretions had prompted the beating.

This, he decides, is a perverted experiment. Not like pulling the wings off a butterfly – the motivation had hardly been cruel, hardly clinical, and he had wanted something from her, to elicit something he shuddered to admit, far more than a foray down the rabbit hole for its own sake. It is more like releasing the butterfly in a birdcage of hungry finches. But he figures the distinction is incidental. Intent is irrelevant. The net effect is one of destruction, still.

He should go very nearly mad, like Blakelock, like _Arnold_ , removing the very constraints imposed at his own insistence, however temporary; however, he reassures himself, purely teleological. If she _could_ paint from memory – as Arnold’s suggestion had once so inflamed him – if she _could_ paint from mere conjuration, what else might she conjure in the process? What fathoms, what _oceans of subtleties_ , might she harness in the pursuit? If she might seem to real to _him_ , then how real might she seem to the guests, how beguiling—

 _If only for the sake of her character, Robert._ Arnold hadn’t meant that to convince him, he realizes now. It had been a sneering, biting commentary, disguised as an appeal to the dispassionate logic Ford himself would have claimed to espouse.

He should become like his father, drunk on power, if not on cheap spirits.

“There are things inside all of us which we should hope not to see,” he observes blandly, and gives the tablet a flippant toss back to the desk. It lands with a dull thud.

“But we have to, don’t we?”

Ford sticks his hands in his pockets and looks back at her, searching her face for the remaining halo of moonlight from the projector, the vestige of a moment frozen in time, a page torn from the book he cannot write. All in the name of a good story.

“We have to look,” she tells him. Maybe that’s it, there, the glint of moonlight in her eye, straining in the ambient light. “Even if it drives us mad.”

Ford rubs at his chin, taking a deep breath in, then out. He watches her pensively for long seconds, before casually lifting his heel, and in a single, purposeful strike, bringing it down to the hanging projector wires. They snap to the floor. The bulb flickers, then dies.

“Yes, Dolores,” he affirms. “I suppose we do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB: the journal referenced in the above chapter, which is as close to a proper footnote as I think I can get in the body of a fanfic, may be found [here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25505714?newaccount=true&read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents). I am no art historian, or expert of any kind, but something about Blakelock's renderings of the American West -- and his own story, tinged with tragedy -- seemed essential to include. Also the pictures, because there's no hope of describing his work, however florid your prose may be, and doing it justice. You should really, really, really check out his paintings.


End file.
